Phishing is still a prevalent issue in today's Internet. It can have financial or personal consequences. Attacks continue to become more and more sophisticated and the advanced ones (including spear phishing) can only be detected if people carefully check URLs. We developed a game based smartphone app -NoPhish -to educate people in accessing, parsing and checking URLs; i.e. enabling them to distinguish trustworthy and non-trustworthy websites. Throughout several levels information is provided and phishing detection is exercised.

Phishing is a prevalent issue of today's Internet. Previous approaches to counter phishing do not draw on a crucial factor to combat the threat-the users themselves. We believe user education about the dangers of the Internet is a further key strategy to combat phishing. For this reason, we developed an Android app, a game called-NoPhish-, which educates the user in the detection of phishing URLs. It is crucial to evaluate NoPhish with respect to its effectiveness and the users' knowledge retention. Therefore, we conducted a lab study as well as a retention study (five months later). The outcomes of the studies show that NoPhish helps users make better decisions with regard to the legitimacy of URLs immediately after playing NoPhish as well as after some time has passed. The focus of this paper is on the description and the evaluation of both studies. This includes findings regarding those types of URLs that are most difficult to decide on as well as ideas to further improve NoPhish.

Phishing is a prevalent issue in today's Internet. It can have financial or personal consequences. Attacks continue to become more and more sophisticated and the advanced ones (including spear phishing) can only be detected if people carefully check URLs -be it in messages or in the address bar of the web browser. We developed a game-based smartphone app -NoPhish -to educate people in accessing, parsing and checking URLs; i.e. enabling them to distinguish between trustworthy and non-trustworthy messages and websites. Throughout several levels of the game information is provided and phishing detection is exercised in a playful manner. Several learning principles were applied and the interfaces and texts were developed in a user-centered design.